Archivio di January 2007

Thursday, 25 January 2007

"....There was also a rather flourishing Vlach State, whose centre was in Thessaly, which included in its dominions the southern slopes of the Pindus and Southern Macedonia up to Castoria. It was semi-independent as early as the latter half of the eleventh century, and survived until Dushan's conquests — a period of three hundred years, which is in the Balkans a highly respectable antiquity. It must not be confused with the Vlacho-Bulgarian Empire of the Asens. From 1204 to 1222 Salonica was the seat of a Latin crusaders' kingdom, under Boniface of Monferrat. This was destroyed by the new Greek power which had arisen in Epirus under the Comneni. ..."

Of the races which inhabit Macedonia to-day only the Albanians have any claim to be autochthonous. Their southern branch, the Tosks, are most likely the lineal descendants of the ancient Epirotes. Their northern branch, the Ghegs, are probably the people whom the ancients called Illyrians. Of the ancient Macedonians whose original seat lay between Monastir and Vodena, no heirs remain, unless indeed any remnants of them escaped civilisation and became confounded with the kindred Albanians. The Thracians may possibly survive in the modern Vlachs, at least in so far as they became absorbed by Roman colonies. All these original races, though doubtless near cousins of the Greeks, must have been very imperfectly Hellenised during the classical and Macedonian periods. The Greek colonies were never much more than trading centres along the coast, and what was Greek in ancient times is Greek to-day. There is no evidence that the interior was ever settled by a rural Greek population. With the Roman conquest came a long period in which the two languages and the two civilisations struggled for the mastery. Military colonies were scattered liberally, and this planting of Latin towns took place only after a ruthless destruction and uprooting of the older Greek cities, whose populations were sold into slavery. Round these colonies the aboriginal inhabitants may have clustered, and acquired the Latin speech which the modern Vlachs still retain. One Byzantine writer remarks significantly that the Thracians never took kindly to Greek, while they acquired Latin with

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ease (Prisci, "Historia," p. 190). By the sixth century Latin had become the language of a considerable part of Epirus, Macedonia, and Thrace. We have acquired a habit of talking of the Byzantine Empire as though it had been a Greek Empire. It hardly acquired a national character until its long, final agony began. It was the Crusades which emphasised its Hellenism, by teaching the Eastern world that the Latin West was still peopled by barbarian hordes. Then in the double struggle against Franks and Turks a Greek patriotism revived too late. But during the earlier centuries of the Empire the Greeks were not even a ruling caste. The Emperors themselves were cosmopolitans of any and every stock. Many of the best of them were Armenians; Justinian was actually a Slav; few were Greeks. Nor was the Eastern Church naturally or originally Greek. The Arians showed a marked preference for the Latin language, and the persecutions of the Catholic party in which they indulged had sometimes the character of an anti-Greek movement. It was indeed during this period of persecution, while Latin-speaking Arians dominated the court that the Orthodox Church became, what it has always remained, the rallying point of Greek patriotism and the only outward embodiment of the Greek national idea. Latin, moreover, even in Justinian's time, was still so far the official language that his great legal codes were composed in it.

Whatever Greek population there may ever have been in the interior of rural Macedonia must have been effectually uprooted by the barbarian invasions. Race succeeded race, conqueror trod on the heels of conqueror, and though few of the strangers effected a permanent settlement until the coming of the Slavs, they destroyed the earlier civilisation and ruined the wealthier classes who had adopted Greek culture. The invaders broke up the large estates, and the slaves who tilled them were appropriated by the barbarians, or else regained their freedom during this secular anarchy. The cultured minority, reduced to penury, and driven to seek refuge in walled towns, sank to the level of their own slaves. The impoverishment was general, and with the

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wealth of the old aristocracy its Hellenic culture disappeared. The general movement to the towns, aided by the amazing policy of the Emperors, created that unique product of Eastern conditions — the Levantine population. A Levantine is essentially a townsman, but not every townsman in the East is a Levantine. The true Levantine belongs to a race which inhabits only the towns — Greek, Jewish, or mongrel-European. He is bred in town, and from the cradle to the grave he never quits the town. He despises the country and the ruder alien races which inhabit the country. Fear confines him within the walls. He knows nothing of muscular work. He has his conquerors and his rulers always with him. He becomes timid and physically incapable of resistance. The growth of this Levantine population had begun centuries before the coming of the Turks. The country was either a desert or a hostile region inhabited by strange barbarians. Whatever military or patriotic instincts the Greeks of the Macedonian towns may have possessed were systematically suppressed by Byzantine policy. The theory of Constantinople was that the function of the settled Greek population was to earn taxes, and Byzantine taxation must have been oppressive both in amount and in incidence. The Greeks were not only exempt from military service even for the defence of their own provinces, but actually forbidden to enlist. They were already what they are under the Turks, a purely civilian population grinding out tribute for a costly governing machine. No landed proprietor or agricultural labourer was allowed to serve, and the army was composed entirely of mercenaries and barbarians. Up till the reign of Justinian the Greek cities still possessed some local independence. But Justinian, casting about for fresh sources of Imperial income, confiscated their revenues. The consequence was that the roads were everywhere neglected, and the police disbanded. Without roads and without security the cities became more than ever isolated, and the general decline towards barbarism and decay proceeded at a swifter pace than ever. Finally, as if to complete the ruin of Hellenism in Macedonia, Justinian, who

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lived in constant terror of revolt, suppressed the militias which the Greek cities had begun to revive under the menace of the barbarian invasions, and left them exposed to the mercy of any raiding horde. When a professor in modern Athens puts forward the theory that the Macedonians of to-day are really Greeks in disguise, the answer is to be found in this chapter of history. Macedonia never was Greek, but such Hellenic civilisation as it possessed was ruined long before the coming of the Turks, and long before the rise of the Servian and Bulgarian Empires. It was ruined by an unconscious conspiracy between the Byzantine Empire and the barbarians.

Disappearance of Greek and Latin Culture. Causes of Early Decay of Greek influence. The Coming of the Slavs

The interior once abandoned by the settled civilised population which paid taxes, its fate became a matter of indifference to Byzantium. The barbarians acted after their kind, settled where they pleased, and raided as they pleased. The only concern of the Empire was now its commerce. The diminished Greek population occupied the sea-coast of the Aegean and the Adriatic, and inland the sole anxiety of its rulers was to keep open the great main roads which carried the wealth of Asia to Western markets. Indian trade now followed the Black Sea route, and the Via Egnatia from Salonica to Dyrrachium was still kept open. The Goths, the Huns, and the Avars did not settle in Macedonia. But the Slavonian tribes which accompanied the Avars as allies undoubtedly did settle, and their villages were to be found even south of the Via Egnatia, so early as the reign of Heraclius (565-633 A.D.). Serbs and Croats were actually invited by Heraclius to settle. As though to encourage barbarians at the expense of Greeks, they lived tax-free and served as militia, despite the fact that they were cultivators, and they doubtless amalgamated with the earlier Slavonic immigrants. These primitive Slav settlers differed widely from the more savage barbarians. They were not so much a pastoral as an agricultural people. They desired to settle rather than to raid. They grouped themselves in villages, which enjoyed a certain communal life, and expected to be left in local independence. They were not properly a

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political people. They formed no organised State. They had no aristocracy, and their leaders were probably elective. They formed neither clans nor towns. Their unit was the hamlet within which their knowledge and their social life was contained. They were jealous of any authority which sought to unite them, and ready to engage in internecine feuds. Their sense of race must have been quite undeveloped, and they readily blended with any other kindred people speaking a Slav tongue. For them the village was the one political reality. Servian and Bulgarian conquests can have altered little in their daily life, and even the Turkish tyranny still left them their indissoluble political atom — their village. They must have been, ten and twelve centuries back, the same primitive and conservative people which they are to-day, plodding, laborious, unaggressive, with the fraternity of village life for the foundation of their virtues. Christianity has altered their theory of the next world, but it can have changed very little in their view of this.

Origin of the Bulgars

The purely Slavonic races, whether they were called Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, or Antai, had undoubtedly peopled Macedonia by the end of the seventh century. But they pretended to no national cohesion, and were not politically a menace to Byzantium. They were rather settlers than conquerors. It required the infusion of non-Slavonic blood to fire them with political ambitions and to organise them into a rival to the Eastern Empire. This impulse came from the Bulgarians (Volga-men), a non-Aryan people akin to the Turks, who had long been settled on the Volga. Their organisation contrasted sharply with that of the Slavs. They had an absolute king or khan, who ruled them as an Oriental despot. They were polygamists, owned slaves, and were accustomed to military discipline. Like the Turks, they shaved their heads and wore pigtails. They burned their widows, and indulged in human sacrifices. These disagreeable Asiatic nomads had no civilisation of their own. They adopted the Slav language, while modifying its structure, and they readily amalgamated and intermarried with the Slavs. This process may have begun

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before they left the Volga, and it was certainly complete before their conversion to Christianity in the year 864, since Cyril and Methodius preached to them in Slav. Their kingdom was founded near Varna in 678, and it covered at first pretty much the territory occupied by modern Bulgaria. Though the Bulgarians gave it its organisation and made it a power, it must none the less have been predominantly Slavonic in blood and in traditions. Their kingdom was hardly consolidated before they began to move upon Thrace and Macedonia. They besieged Salonica as early as 679, and repeated their invasions whenever the Empire was occupied in dealing with the Arabs or the Turks. Under their Khan Krumm they overran Thrace and twice appeared under the walls of Constantinople, defeated and did to death two emperors in succession (Nicephorus and Michael), and made one of the immortal legends of the Balkans by converting the skull of Nicephorus into a drinking-cup. Nearly a century later (892), under their Khan Simeon, who assumed the title of Tsar, the Bulgarians founded their first Empire. It extended at first over the whole of Epirus, Macedonia, Thrace, and Bulgaria. Under the third Tsar, Samuel, the eastern provinces were lost, but the Empire remained firmly seated in the west, with its capital at Ochrida, where it maintained its independence till 1018. [1] It was thus definitely a Macedonian state, and Ochrida acquired in the tradition of the Macedonian Slavs a sentimental prestige which it still retains. After an hiatus of over a century and a half the Bulgarians once more appear as an Imperial Power (1186), under a dynasty of adventurers, by name Asen, who were of Vlach origin. It represented an alliance between Vlachs and Slavs, and it can have been "Bulgarian" only in the sense that it revived the Bulgarian tradition of conquest. It made the most of the anarchy which followed the Fourth Crusade, and allied itself sometimes with the

1. The final blow was dealt by the Emperor Basil, the Bulgar-killer, who is said to have slaughtered 15,000 Bulgarians in a single battle, and to have sent back the remnant of 150 with their eyes put out to tell the tale to Tsar Samuel.

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Greeks and sometimes with the Latins. Three of its sovereigns were assassinated. The fourth, Asen II., was the greatest power in Eastern Europe. He ruled the entire Balkan Peninsula including Servia and Albania, and left the Latins nothing but Constantinople, with which his capital Tirnovo vied in the splendour of its buildings and its material prosperity. But the second Bulgarian Empire fell to pieces immediately after Asen's death in 1241, though Bulgaria retained a shadow of independence until Tirnovo was burned by the Turks in 1393.

Servian Empire

The interval between Asen's death and the coming of the Turks was marked by the rise of an ephemeral Servian State. It first attained a national existence about 1150, under Stephen Nemanya, who was an elective chief in Novi Bazar. Its natural extension was rather to the north than towards Macedonia. Its centre was in the plain of Kossovo (Old Servia), and it included Bosnia, Montenegro, and part of the modern Servia. After the collapse of the second Bulgarian Empire Servia became the dominant power in the Balkans, and now pushed southward over Macedonia and Albania. Under its last Emperor, Stephen Dushan, who fixed his capital at Uskub, it covered the whole Balkan Peninsula except Salonica and Constantinople. Stephen defeated Hungary and the Turks, and seemed on the point of taking Constantinople and destroying the Byzantine Empire in its last refuge when he died suddenly, perhaps by poison, in his camp (1356). His empire, like Asen's, collapsed on his death at the moment of its greatest splendour, and its discordant remnants became the easy prey of the Turks, who finally crushed a weak and disloyal coalition of Servian, Albanian, and Bulgarian princelings on the fatal field of Kossovo (1389). The Servian aristocracy either fled to Bosnia, Montenegro, and Hungary, or accepted Islam, and Macedonia became once more a country of little villages whose whole struggle henceforward was to maintain their isolation and their identity under yet another alien tyranny. [2]

2. This sketch of the political vicissitudes of Macedonia before the coming of the Turks is necessarily incomplete. There was also a rather flourishing Vlach State, whose centre was in Thessaly, which included in its dominions the southern slopes of the Pindus and Southern Macedonia up to Castoria. It was semi-independent as early as the latter half of the eleventh century, and survived until Dushan's conquests — a period of three hundred years, which is in the Balkans a highly respectable antiquity. It must not be confused with the Vlacho-Bulgarian Empire of the Asens. From 1204 to 1222 Salonica was the seat of a Latin crusaders' kingdom, under Boniface of Monferrat. This was destroyed by the new Greek power which had arisen in Epirus under the Comneni.

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Seven centuries elapsed between the complete settlement of Macedonia by Slavonic races and its final conquest by the Turks. Its history during this period suggests little progress towards any stable organisation. It was not the Byzantines or the Serbs who destroyed the second Bulgarian Empire. It was not the Turks who destroyed the Servian Empire. Both fell to pieces, as it were, of their own weight. They fell, both of them, at the moment of their greatest splendour and widest extension, a fact which suggests that they must have been held together, not by the consent of the people, but by the strong will of a vigorous tyrant. It was not in accordance with the traditions of the Slavs to accept a dynasty or build up an Empire; loyalty to a leader of genius, such as Dushan must have been, was another matter. But, indeed, except so far as their disappearance left the field open to the Turks, there is no great reason to regret either the Servian or the Bulgarian Empire. They were purely military Powers, and their glory, such as it was, reposed solely on the achievements of their arms. Their administration was modelled on that of Byzantium. Their official Church — despite the fact that most of their Emperors coquetted with Rome — reproduced all the characteristics of Greek orthodoxy. Their literature was imitative, and, indeed, hardly existed save in translations from Greek ecclesiastical works. Nor was even their architecture their own, so far as they built at all. They either copied Byzantium or imported artists from Italy. Their civilisation, in short, was second-hand, and it must have been a growth so brief and so divorced from the life of the people that it neither left its impress on the peasants, nor in turn received the quickening of their peculiar genius.

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The villages continued to live their own life, and whatever was native and original among the Slavs of Macedonia grew directly from peasant soil. The popular ballads have more value than the ecclesiastical histories. The native Bogomil heresy (see p. 67) was a vastly more interesting attempt to understand the Universe than anything to be found in the formularies of the official Church. The traditional embroideries of the peasant women suggest that the instinct for art might under happier conditions have found some worthy expression. But Macedonia never had its chance. The Crusaders, the Turks, and the absence of political ideals among the Slavs, prevented the formation of any stable State which might have kept the peace and allowed them to develop on their own lines. A tolerant tyranny, even if alien, might have brought this about as well as a native Power, provided they had been allowed to lead the village life for which they have so marked a taste, in comparative freedom and security.

Thursday, 25 January 2007

The Yörük are a Turkic-speaking people primarily inhabiting the mountains of the southeast European Balkan peninsula and Anatolia. Their name is generally admitted to derive from the Turkish verb yürü- (yürümek in infinitive), which means "to walk", with the word Yörük designating "those who walk, walkers".

The Yörük still appear as a distinct part of the population in Macedonian censuses and are generally considered one of the earliest Turkic inhabitants of Anatolia. While the Yörük are increasingly settled, many Yörük still maintain their nomadic lifestyle, breeding goats and sheep in the Pindus (Epirus, Greece & southern Albania), Shar (Rep. of Macedonia), Pirin, Rhodope (Bulgaria) and Taurus (Turkey) mountain ranges. The so-called Kailar Turks (Kailar being the Turkish name for the city of Ptolemaida) who formerly inhabited parts of Thessaly and Macedonia (especially near the town of Kozani) were a group settled.

Their nomadic way of life and the fact that they spread through the Balkans led Arnold van Gennep to try and establish a connection between the Yörüks and the Sarakatsani or Karakachans of Greece. However, the Sarakatsani, from the first moment that they appear in written texts, are mentioned as an Orthodox Christian, Greek and Greek-speaking tribe, and there seems to be no link to the Yörük, whether linguistic and cultural nor religious or other, exept for the fact that they were both transhumant, nomadic people who raised sheep and could be found in the Balkan region during the Ottoman period .

A particular puzzle constitute the so-called Kailar Turks, who formerly inhabited parts of Thessaly and Macedonia (especially near the town of Kozani). These Turks, associated by some scholars with the Yuruks too (see [[Talk:Yörük]]), were a group semi-settled cattle breeders -who also quietly adopted Christianity in order to avoid expulsion after they Thessaly became part of Greece in 1881[[Citing sources citation needed]]. The Kailar Turks are known also by the alternate name of Konariotes.

The Yörüks of Anatolia are often called by the historians and ethnologues by the additional appelative 'Yörük Turcoman' or 'Turkmens'. In Turkey's general parlance today, the terms "Türkmen" and "Yörük" indicate the gradual degrees of preserved attachment with the former semi-nomadic lifestyle of the populations concerned, with the "Türkmen" (aside from the word's other meanings in the international context) now leading a fully sedentary life, while keeping parts of their heritage through folklore and traditions, in arts like carpet-weaving, with the continued habit of keeping a yayla house for the summers, sometimes in relation to the Alevi community etc. and with Yörüks maintaining a yet stronger association with nomadism. These names ultimately hint to their OghuzTurkish roots. Clans closely related to the Yörüks are scattered throughout the Anatolian peninsula, particularly around the chain of Taurus Mountains and further east around the shores of the Caspian sea. Of the Turcomans of Persia, the Yomuts come the closest to the definition of the Yörüks. An interesting offshoot of the Yörük mass are the Tahtadji of the mountainous regions of Western Anatolia who, as they name implies, have been occupied with forestry work and wood craftsmanship since centuries, although they share similar traditions (with markedly matriarchal tones in their society structure) with their other Yörük cousins. The Qashqai people of southern Iran (around Shiraz), and the Chepni of Turkey's Black Sea region are also worthy of mention due to their shared characteristics.

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It is a particular intriguing passage written by Ferdinand Braudel that drew our attention to a topic (which in our age of exclusive and vicious nationalisms, and, to quote Jan Morris one of -sadly- twilight of the multiculturalism) is often ignored: the "overlapping of the civilizations".That is maybe, why he titled one of the chapter of his acclaimed tome ‘The Mediterranean’ with the very title of "Overlapping Civilizations"Writes Braudel referring to the cosmopolitan Balkan Peninsula:

..."To the east by contrast, on the broad plains of Thrace, Rumelia and Bulgaria, the Turks settled their own people and heavily overlaid these regions with their own civilization. These lands, from the Danube to the Aegean, are as open to the north as they are to the south and from both directions, invaders poured in time after time. If the Turkish achievement can be judged -as success or failure- is in these lands which it made nearly as possible as its own. There it found what had become a homogenous population, although composed of groups of diverse ethnic origin: the latest invaders, Bulgarians, Petchenegs and Kumans, from the North, had joined the Thracians, Slavs, Greeks, Aromani and Armenians, already long established there. But all these elements virtually fused, the conversion to the Orthodox faith often being the decisive step towards assimilation of new arrivals. Again this is hardly astonishing in a zone where Byzantium too had exercised a strong influence (...) Only in the Rhodope range and the chain of the Balkans, especially the Sredna Gora, have isolated pockets of independent mountain life survived, that of the Balkandjis, who are to this day a wandering nomadic race, one of the most original in Bulgaria.."

The Ottomans, patiently, conquered patches after patches of the Byzantine lands and set up to dislocate and deport in distant corner of their empire the people that came in their way, subtly then colonizing the newly acquired territories with people of their own stock. Of the latter, the Yuruk Turkmens (or Turcoman) were amongst those favoured as settlers. D.Zucket Feremann mentions the "3.000 families of Yuruk (or Yoruk) Turcomans" implanted in Thessaly already at the end of the 14th century and well in advance to the fall of Constantinople. But the history of these Yuruks is more complex than often is realized. They themselves a loose confederation designated complexly as "nomadic pastoral warriors" related to the Turcomans of Merv, Transoxania and Caspian Gurgan, the Yuruks seem to have entered the Balkan Peninsula quite independent minded and having an agenda of their own, much to the chagrin of their Ottoman patrons. The "Chronicle of Morea" (Chronicon Morea), written between 1333 and 1346 mentions the Yuruk Turcomans as soldiers in the armies of the Frankish princes of Peloponesse between 1204 to 1292 and beyond [3].

The Greek historiography usually encourages the stereotype according to which the Ottomans are presented as conquering Greece from the "Greeks". It has to be understood -to refer only to the Mainland Greece- that neither the major -at that time- city of Salonica (which was a Venetian possession seven years prior to the final Ottoman conquest) nor Athens, which was in the hands of the Florentines, and previously in those of the Catalan Company of Pedro when the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet finally entered it (and has been continuously held by the Catholic ‘Franks’ since 1204) were "Greek" at the time of their sacking by the Turk. The native population, though partly -at surface- Greek speaking, was a complex motley of ethnicities lacking unity or homogeneity despite the attempt of the central Byzantine government to subdue them through taxation, recruitment in the armies, relegating them to the status of parikoi, or dilute their specificity by ascribing (or converting) them to the Greek language officiating Orthodox Church. This heterogeneity rendering the locals passive made even easier for the incisive nomads who were the Yuruk to deeply penetrate Greece and the Balkans. As D. G. Hogarth (who was Director of the British School at Athens) points out, (and it is worth quoting him at length) it was as a result of the movement of population, invasions and resettlements of the early Middle Ages, that many centuries later, as recently as 1905:

..."Boetia, with Euboea is largely in the hands of Toskhs Albanians; Thessaly in those of Vlachs and Anatolians, introduced from Konia about tenth century; and Macedonia, north of Vistritza, in those of a blend of Slavs with Bulgar mixed further with Vlach and Anatolian element. The truth, therefore, seems rather to be that disturbance of the aborigines in the early centuries of our era was of a most drastic sort, and that both the basins and surrounding hills must have been depopulated ere the immigrant appeared. It is only in the valley of Vistritza that any large remnant of a Hellenic population appears to survive. The re-peopling of the basins has been fairly complete except in the case of Thessaly; and the Slavs established a modus vivendi with the Greek and Latin elements in Macedonia, the Turko-Anatolians of Thessaly were probably antagonistic always to the earlier folk, as later they proved to be to the Vlachs.."[4]

The fact is, that the Yuruks had spread over a quasi "deserted land" [5] from Peloponesse up to Macedonia and Rhodope. One of Yuruk exclusive inhabiting area was "east of Salonica" while "they stretched their tents well further east to Serres and Drama, but also in Thrace and Thessaly.." [6] Their presence in Thessaly-intermingled with Vlachs and Greeks- was promptly registered by Brian de Jongh in his "Mainland Companion to Greece" [7] 'Beyond the stream of the Enipeas a chain of barren hills crosses the plain in an east-west direction. The road continues across the plain. Occasionally there are settlements of Vlachs, descendants of the medieval Wallachians, who dwell in alpine villages in the Pindos, in winter descending into the lowlands with their sheep, women and prickly sense of pride. In the Middle Ages, Thessaly was overrun by these nomads. After them came the Serbs, pouring over the Macedonian border. But by the end of the fourteenth century the rivalries of Serbs, Greeks and Wallachians were swept away by the Ottoman conquest. The Turks repopulated Thessaly with peasants from Asia Minor, and leisure-loving pashas carved large estates out of the lands abandoned by the frightened Greeks. Consequently Thessaly was one of the few provinces in the country in which villages grew up with mixed Greek and Turkish population. This triple influx -Wallachian, Seb and Turkish- left a Balkan stamp on the province.."

One obviously is justified to wonder if the Yuruks came into touch with the Vlachs, people who where due to their pastoral and transhumant life style not dissimilar to them -notwithstanding their different linguistic and religious allegiances. There are few references to this presumptive contacts save maybe again for Ferdinand Braudel who writes:

"..Along this entrenched and closely controlled rural society, several groups - the Vlachs and 'Arbanassi' among others - leading a pastoral and semi-nomadic agricultural life (..) seem to have enjoyed a certain independence. But very often Asia caught up with them in the form of nomads who mingled and coexisted with them. The clearest example is that of the Yuruks who would periodically cross the straits to occupy the broad pastureland of the Rhodope: they converted to the Islam the strange Pomaks, poor Moslem Bulgarians carried along the tide of Asiatic nomadism"...

The presence of the Yuruks in Macedonia and Thrace, and their contacts with the Vlachs and the Sarakatsani nomads (who in turn would themselves cross the Strait and roam into Asia Minor and the Anatolian wasteland), would not be ignored by Patrick Leigh Fermor too, who met the "Kutzo-Vlachs" and their kin the Sarakatsani while travelling through Northern Greece in the late 1930's and again in the 1950's. His first hand account of them is worth reproducing:

"Unlike the semi-nomads of Greece -the Kutzovlachs and the Karagounis, who all have mountain villages from which they migrate and to which they return after their half-yearly journeys in search of pastures -the Sarakatsans gave nothing more solid than than the abodes of wicker and rush. All of them, however, look to some range of mountains as their home, some fold or cordillera where they have grazed their flocks for centuries of summers. their lowland pastures are more variable; these uncertain sojourns have few claims on their allegiance. The Sarakatsans of the north had the widest range. The sudden cage of frontiers which sprang up after the Balkan wars failed to confine them and they fanned out in autumn all over southern Albania and across the lower marches of Serbia as far as Montenegro and Herzegovina and Bosnia and into Bulgaria to the foothills of the Great Balkan. Those who thought of the Rhodope mountains as their home - the very ones, indeed, in the highlands that loom above the Thracian plain - were particularly bold in the extent of their winter wanderings. Not only did they strike northwards, like the one I saw by the Black Sea, but, before Hebrus river became an inviolable barrier, their caravans reached Constantinople and up went their wig-wams under the walls of Theodosius. Others settled along the shores of the Sea of Marmara and spread over the rich green hills of the Dardanelles. Many crossed the Hellespont to pitch camp on the plain of Troy. Bold nomads would continue to the meadows of Bithynia and winter among the poplar trees or push on into Cappadocia and scatter their flocks across the volcanic wildernesses round the rock monasteries of Ugrub. The boldest even reached Iconium, the home of Jellalludin and the metropolis of the whirling dervishes. They never looked on these enormous journeys as expatriation: until the deracination of the 1920's, much of the Asia Minor was part of the Greek world (...) The invisible frontier of nomadism overlapped and dovetailed with those other pastoral wanderers, the Yuruks. These Anatolian shepherds, nominally Moslems, grazed their flocks in the hinterland of Asia Minor for centuries before the Seldjuks came; they even paid return migrations, now and then as far as Macedonia. No wonder, then, that some of the aura of a fable hangs about the Sarakatsans.." [7]

Sarakatsana girl of Rhodope.She is wearing a costume almost mediaeval in appearance of which the head-cover often constitutes the piece de resistance

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To get back to the text above, it has to be said that Fermor once again coined the right metaphor when calling the Yuruks 'those other pastoral wanderers'. John Nandris puts them too in the same -extended- complementary context with the Sarakatsani and other transhumant or outwardly nomadic groups. Writes Nandris:

"A Turkic tribe of nomads, the Yuruks, moved about in Macedonia and Thrace following the Turkish occupation, and could be met in the Rhodope even up to the end of the 19th century; while Weigand was of the opinion that Balije, who moved seasonally in Herzegovina in the region now used by Humljaci, were a Yuruk group. There are other groups such as the Meglen Vlachs or Mijaci from Rakika valley of the Black Drim, who sometimes appear to be Slavicized Vlachs; and there are the Sarakatsani who, while they have clearly spoken Greek for some time, have so much in common with the Vlah way of life that (adopting the terminology of some Greek ethnographers) they are perhaps best described as hellenophone Kutsovlachs. There were groups of them in Hoeg's time with no fixed villages, whether in summer or in winter (...) Hoeg also found the Sarakatsani in other parts of Greece, in the Pindus, Thessaly, Macedonia, Pelagonia and in Serbia and the Rhodope, and the present author met them in Thrace, on Vermion, and around Lake Copais in Boeotia. Hoeg attempted to find nomadism, for which there is no evidence, in Classical Greece as an equation for that of the Sarakatsani. Beuermann rejects Hoeg's rationalisations of these facts, which is relevant to the claim frequently put forward that the Sarakatsani are the 'purest of the Ancient Greek' population. There appears to be no mention of 'Sarakatsani' previous to the 18th century" [9]

The 'un-Greeek' -so to speak- look of the Sarakatsani, rendering the controversy around their origin- even more problematic a puzzle, was remarked more recently by the travel writer and Ancient Greek classicist Sarah Wheler too:

'I was fascinated by this elusive, aloof transhumant tribe with beguilingly mysterious origin. They fanned out all over the Balkans and have most closely associated with the Pindus and the Rodopi mountains in the northern mainland: in the fifties there were about 80.000 of them. They spent half of the year in their mountain pastures and the other half in their lowlands.

Their rootlesness was balanced by an elaborate ritualization of almost every aspect of their lives, from costume to the moral code

Evia was the only island used by the Sarakatsani except Poros which was the furthest south they ever got (and perhaps Aegina too). In Evia they were, until this century, only found in the chunk of the island from the Chalkis-Kimi axis northwards about as far a Ayianna, and the cluster of villages around Skiloyanni constituted the most heavily settled Sarakatsani region on the island. There were 50 Sarakatsani families living on Mount Kandili, working as resin- gatherers encased in layers of elaborate costume.

Photographs taken only few decades ago of Sarakatsani women in traditional costume sitting outside their wigwam-shaped branch woven huts.

Many of them had quite an un-Greek looks, and were fair; perhaps that explains the blond heads you see now.

The Sarkatsanoi were known by various names by the indigenous population, usually based on where they were perceived to have come from, and in Evia they were generally called Roumi, Romi or Roumeliotes after the Roumeli region.

People often spoke of them misleadingly as Vlachs. they are settled now, mainly as farmers, with their own permanent pasture land.Their story is one of total assimilation. [10]

Extinct thus on Evia and almost assimilated on the mainland, the Sarakatsani (or 'Karakachani' as they are called in Bulgaria) are survived by their dog breed, the Karakachan dog, still a potent symbol of the Sarakatsani. It is no wonder that this breed triggered more recently the interest of the cynolog

The Bulgarian Karakachan dogs a breed is that is the nearest heir to the Tibetan mastiff together with the Mongolian and the Middle-Asian shepherd dogs, the Caucasian dog, the Shar-mountain dog, the Turkish shepherd dogs Karabash and Akbash, the shepherd dogs of the Tatra and the Carpathian Mountains. The Karakachan dog owes its name and the final formation of its type to the Karakachans. The name "Karakachan" is of Turkish origin and it means "black fugitive". According to most scientists the Karakachans are Hellenized descendents of the Thracians. Their constant home has become the Pind Mountain in the Epir region, which name is connected with the enormous dogs used for fights with lions and elephants. Wandering with their herds across the whole Balkan Peninsula the Karakachans have mixed their dogs with the heirs of the ancient dogs and this process has lasted for hundreds of years. The severe life and the cruel selection made the Karakachan dogs irreplaceable friends of human beings. For the first time the name "Karakachan dog" is officially mentioned in 1938 in an article dedicated to this breed and published in German cynological issue. Nowadays comparatively typical representatives of this breed can be found in the alpine regions of Bulgaria. Unfortunately there is a greater variety of types and important characteristics as height of the withers, length and color of the hairy cover, length and width of the head vary in great limits. Except the anomalies of the exterior, typical feature for most representatives is the lack of their outspoken temperament with which the Karakachan dog excels its closest relatives. Characteristic features of this breed are calmness, moderate aggressiveness, unique braveness and self-respect[11]

It is interesting that the Sarakatsani are called by the name the Turks gave them (and which to a certain extent the Sarakatsani themselves use) which means 'black fugitives' or 'departers'. Isolated for some many centuries, unsettled and refusing to mingle with anyone else outside the clan, the Sarakatsani were for some reason the essential outcasts, as if having to repent for some obscure 'original sin'. Some scholars even go so far and consider them a sort pastoral sect stemming from one of the early mediaeval Byzantine heresies such as the Paulicians or Athinganoi.

And to further complicate the matter, as Vasile Ionescu points out in a recent essay:

'The ascent of Islam and the collapse of the Persian and Byzantine empires pushed various oriental ethnic groups into Europe, among these were the Roma/Gypsies. They drew their different names from the people that they came into contact with, names such as "Arami" (Armenians, pagans), "Faraontseg" (crowd), "Bohemians" (from Bohemia), "Tartars", "Gypsies" (Egyptians), "Saracens" (Arabs), "Athinganoi" (Tziganes). This last name derived from "Cingar", a hypothetical Hindo-Aric population, and afterwards took the meaning of "pagan", "untouchable", relating to the Athinganoi heresy of Cathar origin, historically it defined the Roma ethnic community. The ethnonym "Roma" (from the Greek term "Rhomaios", denomination for the inhabitants of the Roman Empire and for the Christians of Byzance until the collapse of the Empire) used with "Sinto" (the Roma from the Germanic area) and "Kalo" (the Roma from the Hispanic region) defines a transfrontier ethnic community with its own language and culture' [12]

Another transhumant knit-close pastoral community of the Southern Balkans, the so-called Karagouni, whose name translates by 'the black furs' are quite undistinguishedly now settled in the villages of the planes of Thessaly made vacant after the hasty departure of the Ottoman landlords in 1881. Related to the Vlachs (especially to their wandering Farseroti branch) and to the Sarakatsani, the Karagouni or Karagounidhes are another puzzling tribe whose original ethnic affiliation is difficult to decrypt at present with accuracy. To further complicate the issue names starting with Kara are even today instantly recognized in Greece as denoting the Vlach origin of the bearer. To this day, in inland Anatolia, two of the major surviving Yuruk shepherding tribes are the Kara-koyunlu and the Ak-koyunlu: the Black respectively the White Sheep Turcomans which for a time, in the late Middle Ages became rulers of Persia. The scions of the White Sheep can to this day be found in central Persia surviving within the ranks of the powerful still migratory Qashgai tribe and one of the branches of them is called 'Kara Khanlu', still numbering 300 families. In the 1950's Marie-Therese Ullens de Schooten, a famously beautiful socialite and wife of a Belgian diplomat spent some time among the Qashgai people at the invitation of their Khan or supreme tribal leader Nasser Khan. Below is her first hand account on the Qashgai, for whom she is using the alternative spelling 'Kashkai':

'I was determined to get all possible information about the Kashkai Tribes. This is what Malek Mansur (the Oxford educated brother of Il Khan Nasser) told me:'To survive, nomads have been always obliged to fight. They lead a wandering life and do not accumulate documents and archives.'But in the evenings, around fires that are burning low, the elders will relate striking events, deeds of valour in which the tribes pride themselves. Thus the epic tale is told from father to son, down through the ages.'The tribes of Central Asia were forced by wars, strife, upheavals, to abandon their steppes and seek new pasture grounds...so the Huns, the . Visigoths, and before them the Aryans, had invaded India, Iran, Europe. 'When Jengis Khan set forth as "Conqueror of the World", the eddies of his wars and battles sent new waves of unrest across the Asian plateau."The Turks, forsaking the regions where they had dwelt for centuries, started moving down through the Turan and Caspian depressions, establishing themselves eventually on the frontiers of the Iranian Empire and in Asia Minor.'We are of Turkish language and race; some say we are descendants of the Turkish Ghuzz Tribe, known for its cruelty and fierceness, and our name is derived from the Turkish "Kashka" which means "a horse with a white star on its forehead". Other think this name indicates that we came from Kashgar in the wake of Hulagu. Others still that it means "fugitive"

Coincidence or not -this very name 'fugitives' or 'departers' was often given, as seen above, to the Sarakatsani or Kara-katchani. But to return to Marie-Therese Ullens de Schooten:

'Though different versions differ, we believe that the arrival of our Tribes in Iran coincided with the conquest of Jengis Khan, in the thirteenth century. Soon after, our ancestors established themselves on the slopes of the Caucasus. We are the descendants of the "Tribe of the Ak Koyunlu" the "Tribe of the White Sheep" famed for being the only tribe in history capable of inflicting a defeat on Tamerlane. For centuries we dwelt on the lands surrounding Ardebil, but in the first half of the sixteenth century we were settled in southern Persia, Shah Ismail having asked us to defend this part of the country against the intrusions of the Portuguese. Thus, out Tribes came to the Province of Fars, near the Persian Gulf, and are still only separated from it by a ridge of mountains, the Makran"The yearly migration of the Kashkai, seeking fresh pastures, drive them from south to the north, where they move their summer quarters "Yeilak" in high mountains; and from the north to the south to their quarters, "Qishlaq". In summer, the Kashkai flocks graze on the slopes of the Kuh-e-Dinar; a group of mountains from 12,000 to 15,000 feet, that are a part of the Zagros chain.'In autumn the Kashkai break camp, and by stages leave the highlands. They winter in the warmer regions near Firuzabad, Kazerum, Jerre, Farashband, on the banks of the river Mound, till, in April, they start once more on their yearly trek' [13]

And that these 'Turcomans' -of which the Qashgai were a splinter group- co-existed, at the end of the day, before heading south or elsewhere- with their Christian neighbours and military kin is not a secret anymore. The passage below contains a key phrase as to the complicity between such Christian heretic sects as the Monophysites and the Turkomans themselves. Writes the French historian Claude Cohen:

'Co-existence in the Turcoman border territories is more difficult to understand, though no less certain. Warfare against an undefeated adversary did not exclude the protection of the subjugated infidel. In these circumstances it came about that the Christian natives preferred to seek an understanding with the Turkomans rather than the protection of the Byzantine government, so often disdainful and ineffective and accompanied by heavy taxation. History is full of such minor arrangements between neighbours, who then found themselves allied together against their respective rulers. In the time of Alexis Comnenus, the complicity of the Monophysites with the Turks seemed to the Byzantine to be so established that they proceded to take revenge on the members of those communities who were settled in Constantinople' [14]

Christian 'Byzantines' akritai and border-people or ‘frontier-dwellers’ Turcoman ghazis or 'infidels' are said, according to Claude Cahen, to have almost fraternized one with another. Below again, again a key passage:

'The conquest of Asia Minor by the Turks and the transformation into the country of 'Turkey' has always appeared to Europeans to constitute without question something incomprehensible, inadmissible and slightly outrageous. We begin with the assumption that Asia Minor

in the middle of the eleventh century must still have been, apart from some points of details, the highly urbanized, cultivated and Hellenized Asia minorof the Roman times.Even for Antiquity, this idea is an over-simplification. Geographical conditions have never permitted the same degree of development of this kind in central and eastern Anatoliaas in the provinces facing the Aegean. But, whatever the exact position may have been, the subsequent wars against the Persians and the Arabs had profoundly changed the face of the country.

For generations, vast areas, particularly on both sides of the Taurus and Cappadocia, had suffered from retaliatory raids, plundering and devastation. On both sides, the existence of a no man's land had at times been regarded as the best defence against the enemy, not to speak of massacres, such as that of the Paulician heretics by the Byzantines in the ninth century in the region of Divrigi Tephrike.

When, on the other hand, an attempt was made to repopulate certain zones, it was necessarily by means of imported populations which, in the case of Byzantines and depending on their reconquest, were often Slav or Bulgar, and were, of course, of a military character.These frontier-dwellers -Byzantine akritai and Muslim ghazis -though fighting against each other, were alike in their physical and spiritual isolation from the governments, which took almost no part in their activity, and as a result they sometimes almost fraternized. Evidence of this is provided in the chivalrous romances or poems which recount the exploits of both sides.' [15]

Conversions, assimilations, repopulations, imported population: this was a pattern followed throughout the history in the Balkans too. As the historian points out again:

‘In studying the history of the Balkans, it must be borne in mind that here more than elsewhere in Europe, linguistic and ethnic boundaries are always changing. There have been many wholesale emigrations and immigrations. Whole countrysides have changed not only masters but also peasantry, in mass evictions and mass colonization

The Balkan peoples change their languages and ethnic identity with difficulty and only after bitter oppression. It is easier to transplant them than alter them. But once converted, however, they become ardent partisans of the new identity’ [16]

Thursday, 25 January 2007

Mi chiamo Georgios Dachris, and am writing to you because of the inclusionof articles about the Sarakatsani on your weblog. I am a member of theSarakatsani Association of Greece and two more local Sarakatsani Associations inIoannina and Athens.

The thing that drew my attention is that you seem to consider theSarakatsans as Aromanians/vlachs, while in fact they are not. It is a problemthat our associations have to deal daily, and something that I personally can'tunderstand. Every moth there are articles written on the subject, pointing outthe dissimilarities between the two peoples, and in conventions the matter israised again and again. Many Sarakatsans wonder why the subject of the supposedrelation between Aromanians and Sarakatsans comes up again nad again, when somany good scholars (e.g. Carsten Hoeg) have written explicitly on the subject.

We always spoke Greek and don't have any particular customs that connectus to the Vlachs any more than to any other ethnic group in the Balkans. Ofcourse, in Bulgaria we are presented to be Hellenised Thracians and in Turkey,Christianized Turks. If you read the pages that you link to (including theRomanian ones) you will see that they all mention the Sarakatsans as Greek, orat least Greek-speaking. If you check out the Vlach webpage www.farsarotul.org,(the people that we are supposed to be related with), you will see that eventhey themselves dismiss any relationship to the Sarakatsani as mere propagandaor oversimplification. One wonder why I insist so much on this matter.Basically, it think that it is, at least, unscientific. It would be the same ifan American included Sicilians or Apulians in a Piemonte-related article on hiswebpage, because they all speak Italian. At any rate, we have our own customs,our own language and our own history. I can't understand why we can't have ourown identity.

I hope that you'll make the change and refrain to Vlach-related topics only!

Wednesday, 24 January 2007

The anthropologist Georges Kavadias summarizes some of the theories about the Sarakatsani in Pasteurs-Nomades Mediterraneens: Les Saracatsans de Grece as follows:

1) The Sarakatsani are the lineal descendants of the Dorian tribes who lived in what is today Greece over three thousand years ago. This theory is endorsed by Greek historians and by a couple of Western European scholars who happen to be enthusiastic philhellene scholars too.

2) They are a branch of the nomadic Farseroti Vlachs who became Hellenized in the second-half of the 18th century under the pressure of the proselyt monk Cosmas of Aetolia (who later became sanctified). There are countles Vlach words still in use in the vocabulary of the Sarakatsani. Moreover, the Sarakatsani have the same socio-political patterns of organizing themselves as the Vlachs. Each socio-political unit was called a celnicat, in which each unit was lead by a leader known as a celnic (in Vlach) or tselingas (in its Grecized form). The word celnic/tselingas is of Slavic origin meaning 'forehead' (metopo in Greek). This theory is endorsed by Romanian and Romanians of Vlach descent scholars such as Nicolaie Iorga, Tache Papahagi and Theodor Capidan, as well by the Austro-Hungarian scholar Lajos von Thalocy.

3) They are a Christianized branch of the nomadic shepherd tribe of the Yoruk (or Yuruk) Turcomans (according to the great French sociologist Arnold van Gennep, a scholar to whom we owe the term rite of passage).

The Sarakatsani may have been bilingual in both Greek and Latin. Evidence of this can be found in texts written by authors such as Katakouzinos II, Procopius, and Kasomoulis. These authors state that before the advent of the Ottomans in southeastern Europe, Greek-speaking Greeks only lived in the coastal cities of Epirus and Aetoloakarnania, and that the remaining people who resided in the mountains were Arvanitovlachs. Other testimonies from Cousinery, Pouqeville, Heuzey, Tertsetis, Frantzis, and Deligiannis confirm that the population in Epirus, Aetoloakarnania and western Macedonia were bi-lingual.The people known today as the Sarakatsani were referred to as Roumeliotes by authors such as Georges Kavadias even though the Sarakatsani did not use that name themselves. Based on an account by Fotakos, the people currently known today as the Sarakatsani referred to themselves as Moraites when they migrated to Thessaly after the Greek Revolutiion.

A Czech author by the name of Jirecek found the Moraitian tribe as a Latin-speaking populace that eventually became Greek-speaking (Gesty Pobulgarsky, Praze 1888 p. 220 and Das Furstentum Bulgariens 1891 p. 119). So perhaps the Sarakatsani spoke a mixed Greek-Latin language and became Greek monolinguals after the Greek Revolution.

Here it is the greek opinion (the one of Koukoudis) on the Sarakatsani:

....."There's a mistaken view that the Sarakatsani are linguistically Hellenised Vlachs. It was first presented and cultivated by pro-Romanian writers, but is difficult to support with documentation. It also looks like an attempt (one of many) to strengthen the artful impression that the Vlach populations were much greater than they really were. In the end, the Sarakatsani are simply Greek-speaking fully nomadic groups of stockbreeders who are also known as vlahi with a small v. This is further supported by the fact that the Vlachs themselves regard them as Greki, and that the Sarakatsani refuse to define themselves as Vlachs with a capital v. After all, there have been nomadic and semi-nomadic stockbreeding populations of other linguistic groups in the Balkans besides the Vlach-speakers for at least the past three centuries (18th-20th), because nomadism and transhumance have never been the exclusive prerogative of Vlach-speakers. Nor must we forget that most of the Vlachs' linguistic assimilation has taken place not in the mountains, where they have, after all, dominated, but in agricultural villages on the plains and in the vicinity of large and small economic, urban, and administrative centres.

As for the artificial terms 'Macedono-Vlachs' and 'Macedo-Romanians', which have been applied to the Vlachs, not only are they unsuccessful political neologisms, they're also unfair to the Vlachs. For Vlachs have always existed way beyond the geographical limits of Macedonia, most notably in Thessaly, Epiros, and Albania. This study makes it clear that the present diaspora of people of Vlach origin throughout the Balkan countries is the result of comparatively recent population shifts. While 'Vlach populations' are presented as milling about over the length and breadth of the central Balkans in the Middle Ages and the Byzantine period, the consolidation of Ottoman rule coincided with a rearrangement of these mediaeval 'Vlach' population groups and their villages and settlements. Until 1769, which was the date of the first collapse of Moschopolis and marked the start of some major exoduses and diasporas, the only surviving Vlach populations were in the south-west Balkans, along the Greek peninsula. Prior to that, the older and mediaeval 'Vlach populations', who lived to the north and east of a notional line running from Durrës, across Mount Pelister, and through Moglena to Thessaloniki, seem to have been assimilated and disappeared. The older and mediaeval 'Vlach populations', whoever they were, in Thrace, Bulgaria, Serbia, Kosovo, northern Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and as far as Dubrovnik (Ragusa) on the Dalmatian coast had already died out. One typical example of this process is the disappearance of the mediaeval 'Vlach populations' of the Asanid dynasty, who had lived in what is now Bulgaria, probably based in the Balkan Mountains (Stara Planina)...."